THE WARMTH OF A GENIUS

Jon AndersonCHICAGO TRIBUNE

At first glance, the workplace of James Alfred Van Allen looks like the back room of a county land-title office. It has a desk cluttered with paper, rows of books on metal library shelves, forests of files, and one person, a wry man with a ready smile, who says he knows where everything is.

"A lot of people have heard your name, but don't know much about you," a visitor begins, with the awe that comes from facing a person who has a natural phenomenon-and a university building-named for him.

"Just as well," says Van Allen, 78, emitting a chuckle.

Despite his modesty, it is a matter of record that out of this man's mind have come ideas and instruments for 24 explorations of space: the 1962 Mariner 2 investigation of Venus, the first successful mission to another planet; the 1958 probe that discovered intense radiation belts, later named for him, around the Earth; the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, launched in the '70s, which surveyed radiation belts around Jupiter and Saturn and are now 5 billion miles away, halfway to their next goal-the edge of the solar system.

Physics can be risky business. Once, in the 1940s, Van Allen was closer to what he calls "the smoke and flame department" of space science, working with captured German rockets, and rocketmeister Wernher von Braun, at White Sands, N.M., to devise new ways of lofting his instruments. "I give you one chance in 100 of reaching the age of 60," moaned an older colleague, alarmed by the brief and blinding blasts of errant launches.

At other times, on the swaying decks of ships, he oversaw the launching of balloons to transport rockets above the atmosphere, where there was less drag once they were fired. There were dicey times. Lines got tangled. Rigs failed. During World War II, while developing a proximity fuse, which radically improved anti-aircraft fire, he was a gunnery officer on the USS Washington, helping ward off a kamikaze attack.

A day of terror

A different form of menace erupted just before 4 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1991, the grimmest afternoon in the history of the University of Iowa. In a half hour of slaughter, a 1991 doctoral graduate of the physics department, embittered by what he considered an academic slight, brought a handgun to Van Allen Hall and killed two of his professors, the department dean and a fellow graduate he considered a rival, and, later, in a nearby building, a university vice president and himself.

On that dreadful day, Van Allen was in his office, aware of none of the drama downstairs, "when a young associate came through the door, looking rather wild-eyed, and said: `Van, you'd better close your door. There's been someone shooting down on the second floor, and we don't know where he is now.' "

From his sixth-floor window, Van Allen could see police cars, ambulances and fire trucks on the street below. "I knew it was serious," he says, "but I didn't understand what was happening. Half an hour later, a campus policeman came in. He said it was all clear. The man had killed himself."

The killings, and the serious wounding of a receptionist (see accompanying story), stunned the university community. Besides its human dimensions, it was a substantial blow to a department for which Van Allen had laid the theoretical foundations and lined up funding for a building, later named for him, with grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation. With the university in an austerity mode, the deaths of three senior faculty members also led to a staffing struggle. Eventually, the administration allowed the department to hire one full professor and two visiting professors.

"He and Abby were there in a quiet way, giving solace. They were a very clear presence and brought a lot of stability and warmth," recalls a longtime friend, Sandy Boyd, speaking of Van Allen and his wife of 47 years, the former Abigail Fithian Halsey II. She is the daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman and a distant cousin of Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey, under whom Van Allen served in the South Pacific in World War II.

"In many ways," Boyd says, "they are always there when you need them, with a kind of quiet intensity and great loyalty."

Van Allen also pitched in on a professional level. For a year, he has been acting editor of the monthly Journal of Geophysical Research, the major outlet for 500 or more scholarly papers a year in the field. One of the slain professors, Christoph Goertz, a close associate with whom Van Allen had worked on solar terrestrial physics, had been the journal's editor.

A true pioneer

Stability, along with an Iowa sense of roots, has always been important to Van Allen, as he noted in a 1990 paper titled "What Is a Space Scientist? An Autobiographical Example." His wife and five children, he wrote, "have provided the circumstances under which sustained and intensive professional work has seemed worthwhile." His own upbringing, he added, was based on the "pioneer qualities" of frugality, hard work, devotion to education, affection, nurture and comprehensive self-reliance.

Van Allen's grandfather, George Clinton Van Allen, was a surveyor for what is now the Burlington Northern Railroad. In 1862, he settled in Mt. Pleasant, about 50 miles south of Iowa City. He became a lawyer, as was his only son, Van Allen's father. Like earlier pioneer homemakers, Van Allen's mother, a country teacher before her marriage, cooked from scratch, baked bread, canned fruits and vegetables and ministered to her children.

Every night, Van Allen's father read aloud for an hour, often from The Book of Knowledge or National Geographic magazine. Then came two to three hours of homework. The children raised chickens, tended a vegetable garden and an apple orchard, split wood and fired the furnace. Early on, young Van Allen became intensely interested in mechanical and electrical devices.

Working from ideas gleaned from Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, he built motors, radios and other devices, once horrifying his mother by constructing a coil that produced foot-long electrical discharges and made his hair stand on end. Later, majoring in physics, he graduated summa cum laude from Iowa Wesleyan College, and moved on to the University of Iowa for his master's and doctoral degrees. He graduated in 1939.

When war erupted in Europe, Van Allen's mission was to develop a new type of fuse that would help the Allies bolster their anti-aircraft defenses by improving their hit ratio. The work was deemed so important, he says, that his superior, Merle Tuve, warned him, "I don't want you to waste your time saving money." In case German spies got ideas, he was given a permit to carry a loaded revolver while shuttling to and from a test site in southern Maryland.

Valuable lessons

Torn from the academic world, Van Allen was impressed with the code of honor and protocols of Navy life. "I gained a profound respect for the raw power and grandeur of the sea and a corresponding respect for seamen," he wrote. "Among other things I learned in the Navy by close observation of my peers and superiors was how to make a sound decision when the basis for a decision was diffuse, inadequate and bewildering. This lesson has served me well."

At war's end, he went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to continue his explorations in electromagnetic and high-ionosphere research. In 1946 he persuaded military contacts to let him in on firing captured German V-2 rockets, using them to carry scientific payloads to new altitudes. The challenge, for a space physicist, was to keep the instruments up there.

In 1951, he returned to Iowa City, becoming head of what is now the University of Iowa's department of physics and astronomy. It was a place, he felt, where he could have the time he needed to do concentrated work without much interruption.

"We were handcrafting materials under primitive conditions, though it was state-of-the-art then," says Donald Gurnett, an Iowa physics professor who first met Van Allen when Gurnett was a student in 1958. "Data analysis was done under what we would view now as terribly primitive conditions. On paper charts and plots, analyzed by hand. It was an era when the Soviets had launched a spacecraft before us. We were catching up, with a great deal of urgency. Projects were carried out on a vastly shorter time scale. Things were simpler then."

`Good old days'?

Satellites vastly improved the gathering of space information. One early venture sent back reports from 3,600 passes over reporting stations, the equivalent of firing 3,600 rocket probes, an unlikely possibility.

Operating on a shoestring, Van Allen and three, sometimes four, disciples worked on wooden tables set up in a basement corridor of the old physics building. They did welding, soldering, connecting and testing of gauges, measuring devices, thermometers, cloud chambers and counters, then shipped the packages to what was then Cape Canaveral for launching into space.

His biggest triumph, Van Allen says, came with Explorer 1, the first successful U.S. satellite, launched Jan. 31, 1958.

"The fun," he says, "was the fun of achievement. It was a real treat, getting that to work. We got lots of data. I worked in the lab to show how that data could be understood, and found the radiation belt. That paper was published in 1958. It's still basically good. I got it right."

What is the Van Allen radiation belt?

It is, a visitor hears, actually a series of belts consisting of high-energy particles trapped in spiraling paths by the Earth's magnetism. Circling like a giant, gaseous donut about 250 miles up to perhaps 40,000 miles up, the radiation is dangerous to humans, who could tolerate perhaps five hours of it a week-long enough to rocket through but too short for orbiting.

"It is one of the fundamental mechanisms for the generation of radio waves from astrophysical objects," Van Allen says. "It's a very interesting system, on a grand scale, with an enormous body of physics reflected in it."

No slowing down

Van Allen retired from classroom teaching in 1985, but he remains almost as busy as ever.

"I'm well aware of the actuarial tables for people my age," he says. To keep fit, in winter he goes for what he calls "long, boring walks," 3 miles a day, around the university's indoor track. In summer he often parks his 1981 Plymouth Reliant station wagon and hikes around Iowa City.

Not many recognize him. But to those who do, he's something of a legend.

"Everybody in Iowa City will tell you the same thing," says Clark Houghton, retired chairman of the First National Bank of Iowa City. "He's friendly, modest and very special. He never wants you to know how smart he is."

"He's always been articulate, but he used to be very shy. Didn't say anything at all. Now you can't stop him," says his wife, Abigail, who was working as a data analyst at the Johns Hopkins applied physics laboratory before they married on Oct. 13, 1945.

A theologian, aware of Van Allen's space ventures, once asked him if he ever felt close to God.

His reply: "When my children were born."

The Van Allens have five children. While he proudly runs through the list of who's where, a visitor can't help but be distracted by the file folders above his desk. One is marked "Mars," another "Venus," a third "Jupiter."

`I'm at parade rest'

Galileo, a mission in which he had a hand, will reach Jupiter on Dec. 7, 1995. It may be less successful than others because it is suffering from a balky antenna, but Van Allen hopes to be around when its signals start coming back. Until then, he says, "I'm at parade rest."

Well, not exactly.

"I'm just about done working on a book, `Elementary Problems in Solar System Astronomy,' for the University of Iowa Press, a course I taught for many years." And, he says, "I just did a paper on an event in the summer of 1990, an extraordinary shock wave emitted by the sun which we tracked past the Earth, past Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11 and Voyager 1, measuring its velocity and magnitude."

Does he have any desire to go to, say, the moon?

"Not really," he says. "I couldn't think of anything I'd really want to do there, except be kind of a tourist. It's an extremely desolate place. I have so many other things I'd like to do with my time."

Most of them, one expects, will be done in this office, surrounded by his banks of data, journals, notebooks and one old computer.

"I just love this little spot," he says. "I get things straight here. Saturday and Sunday, especially, are good quiet times. I love to work."